“Yes,” came his answer to the obvious, rat-a-tat questions Oprah Winfrey posed to open her two-part interview with sport’s greatest living fraud. Yes, he used banned EPO, testosterone, cortisone and human growth hormone and engaged in blood doping throughout the deceitful sham that saw him win a record seven Tour de France titles.

No, he didn’t believe it was humanly possible to accomplish such a feat without doping. Up until then—about two minutes into this pre-recorded, live-streaming “confessional” sitdown with Oprah which aired Thursday night—Armstrong was actually believable, maybe even a tiny bit likable and not a raging sociopath.

And then, as quickly as a carved turn, he proved that very little he says should be taken at face value.

For one, he swatted away Oprah’s assertion that the drug program he orchestrated and reaped tens of millions from was, as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called it, “the most sophisticated, professional doping program in the history of sports.”

Look at East Germany in the '80s, he responded, because he’s still so programmed to avert and deflect. Maybe this is the moment where he should have jumped on Oprah’s couch.

Apparently he wanted Oprah and the viewers to believe the drug cartel he ran while with the taxpayer-supported U.S. Postal Service team wasn’t all that massive. “It was definitely professional and it was definitely smart if you can call it that, but it was very conservative, very risk-averse,” Armstrong said.

As if he didn’t have access to tremendous funds and covert avenues in which to facilitate and cover up his team’s prolific use of PEDs. In his book “The Secret Race,” Tyler Hamilton, Armstrong’s former teammate, wrote that Armstrong signed exclusive deals with the most coveted doping doctors.

As Hamilton told “60 Minutes,” not all of the doping programs were equal: “A lot of people didn't have the money, you know? Blood doping, for example, took a lot of money, a lot of details, a posse of sophisticated, you know, know-what-they're-doing kind of people. And Lance had those.”

Like Pete Rose and Roger Clemens, everything Armstrong utters must be fact-checked and verified through independent sources. The curious saga of Manti Te’o’s dead fake girlfriend is just another reminder that, as much as the public and journalists want to believe in magical stories, this doesn’t make them true.

He still won’t admit the half of it. He can’t even remember if he sued Emma O’Reilly, the former Postal Service team masseuse who spent a fortune on legal fees defending Armstrong’s (obviously false) charges that she lied about what she knew to be true. Armstrong’s scorched-earth policy included calling her an alcoholic and a prostitute, and though he’s knee-deep in his apology tour, there still wasn’t a public one about how he slandered her, made her unemployable on the circuit and caused her to nearly go bankrupt.

“Not good … I was just on the attack, Oprah,” Armstrong said, adding that this is how he reacted when his territory and his team were threatened, as if this justified his weak use of the ageless misogynist codes.

He still just can’t help himself. While admitting that he did call Betsy Andreu, the wife of one of his former teammates and closest friends, a “crazy bitch,” he swore with a disturbing laugh that he never said she was “fat.” Pity this man’s poor daughters.

Again, he did his best to obfuscate, and while Oprah threw some fairly hard fastballs his way, she let him escape at times, such as when he refused to say whether Andreu was lying when she testified under threat of perjury that she and her husband, Frankie, overheard him in a hospital room in 1996, while he was fighting cancer, confessing that he had used EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone and cortisone. Two doctors were said to be present for that conversation.

These are the same banned drugs Armstrong swore for years that he never touched—that he admitted stone-faced to Oprah that, sure, they were a part of his repertoire since the mid-'90s. That’s some non-apology Armstrong offered the Andreus for basically ruining their lives.

Many of those in his inner circle who were aware of his use of PEDs have spent the past decade dodging rocks heaved by Armstrong. Some were run out of pro-cycling, others like O’Reilly and Frankie Andreu were blackballed from getting jobs within the community. Armstrong’s personal assistant Mike Anderson was so harassed, he and his family had to flee to New Zealand. Greg LeMond’s bike company was nearly destroyed … the list of those bullied and intimidated by Armstrong and his team is so voluminous, there might not be enough hours in the days to ever fully apologize.

"It's a major flaw, and it's a guy who expected to get whatever he wanted and to control every outcome," he said. "And it's inexcusable. And when I say there are people who will hear this and never forgive me, I understand that. I do."

His worldwide apology tour began a few days ago, when he faced executives and supporters of the Livestrong Foundation that has since fired him. There he expressed regret for causing them stress as a result of the controversy.

(By the way, can we lay waste to the fallacy that Armstrong did so much good for cancer research? Livestrong doesn't donate to cancer research—hasn't for a long time—but it did spend on an awful lot of money flying the face of the organization around to parties/events where he was the main event. Perhaps Oprah will delve into this Friday night during Part 2.)

He blamed cancer for turning him into a raging bully, saying it gave him a ruthless desire to win at all costs. But Oprah didn’t nudge the elephant in the room: Did he believe cancer-causing PEDs caused him to get testicular cancer?

“This story was so perfect for so long,” he said.

And: “It’s this mythic, this perfect story and it wasn’t true.”

At times he seemed particularly nervous, at other moments he smiled creepily. When he said he didn’t dope during his 2009 comeback—2005 was the last time he says he used PEDs, conveniently putting him beyond the statute of limitations—his eyes darted in different directions, like a petty thief on the witness stand. He basically admitted to committing perjury in a deposition but steadfastly refused to identify any of his cohorts in this vast conspiracy.

When asked if he ordered teammates to dope, he looked as if he were speaking about someone in the abstract, saying, “There was never a direct order—that never happened … but there were people on the team that chose not to,” Armstrong said, and somewhere Christian Vande Velde must have thrown his shoe at the television.

It’s Vande Velde who insists Armstrong threatened him with being kicked off the Postal Service team if he didn’t conform with the doping program. Others testified Armstrong demanded they use PEDs in order to help him win. Armstrong told Oprah this was “not true,” but why should he be believed for saying the sky is blue when it’s actually midnight?

He wouldn’t say much about his great friend Michele Ferrari, the banned Italian sports doctor who reportedly still received payments from Armstrong in 2009, when Armstrong swears he was clean.

"I don't want to accuse anybody else. I made my decisions,” said Armstrong, and you could almost hear a sigh around the planet from what the USADA’s scathing report called his “army of enablers.”

From the Bay Area, what must have been going through the mind of Thom Weisel, the alpha financier of the Postal Service team and integral cog in USA Cycling? Weisel is named as one of the defendants in the federal whistle-blower lawsuit filed by Floyd Landis, one of Armstrong’s former teammates and confessed user of PEDs.

Armstrong made it clear he’s not inclined to publicly reveal the gory details about how he and his peers for years evaded detection or procured their drugs. He only spoke of how testing has evolved. From Europe, officials at the International Cycling Union must have sighed the loudest. There have been accusations of bribery and cover-ups of positive drug tests, but so far Armstrong hasn’t named any big-time officials as his accomplices. Oprah might need to waterboard him to extract this information.

“I didn’t invent the culture but I didn’t try to stop it. And now the sport is paying the price,” Armstrong said, in one of his most honest statements.

All of this hedging and truth telling is designed to get the World Anti-Doping Agency to reduce its lifetime ban of him to eight years. (Only if he testifies under oath is that happening.) At 41, Armstrong wants to race again, to participate in triathlons, the sport of his youth.

But he’s still so lost in his narcissist bubble, he can’t see the true finish line. If he could, if he were really humble and contrite, he’d have offered to return his bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Games, before the International Olympic Committee had to demand it.

He certainly wouldn’t have told Oprah that he didn’t think he was cheating because all the other competitors also were doping. He called it “a level playing field,” more hogwash. How many riders did he chase from the sport because they didn’t want to use illegal means, didn’t want to risk their health? We’re only just beginning to hear their voices.

Here is one of the biggest lies he helped perpetuate—Everyone did it. No, they did not. We know the winners and high placers in a decade’s worth of Tours were frauds, but what of the back-of-the pack riders? Armstrong owes them apologies on his grand I-did-it-and-I’m-sorry-I-was-such-an-awful-human tour. He might also want to say a few words to the young athletes who may never have a chance to compete on the Olympic level, because the removal of cycling from the Games will possibly be another of the very sad fallouts from this travesty.

Armstrong, as plenty in the sport have noted (including Daniel Coyle, the co-author of Hamilton’s book), never would have been such a force without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs. “He wasn’t the kind of athlete who would win the Tour. He was the wrong size,” Coyle said in a radio interview. “In terms of would he have won the Tour ever as a clean athlete? The answer is almost certainly no.”

PEDs allowed Armstrong to achieve a platform unimaginable. It was one of riches and accolades and private jets and minions who’d just as easily demolish his critics’ reputations as they would crush a bug. Cycling doesn’t deserve him, but his ego won’t let him leave through the alleyway.

“Look, I love cycling. I disrespected the rules … I stand on no moral platform here. It’s certainly not my place to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s clean up cycling,’” he told Oprah.

But if there were to be some sweeping of the cobwebs “and if I’m invited,” he said, “I’ll be the first man in the door.”

Give Armstrong this: At least he had the dignity to not make a fake reach for a tissue.